Paleontologists Find Dinosaur Protofeather

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Paleontologists Find Dinosaur Protofeather

Evidence continues to accumulate that feathers evolved for purposes unrelated to flight.

The latest proto-feather-clad skeleton is more than 100 million years old. It was unearthed in northeastern China by paleontologists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the same paleontologists who revealed to the world Epidexipteryx, a pigeon-sized dino with four ostensibly decorative tailfeathers.

Epidexipteryx had no flight feathers, and was seen as "fascinating evidence of evolutionary experiments with feathers that were going on before small dinosaurs finally took to the air," as London Natural History Museum curator Angela Milner told the BBC. But its feathers were still relatively advanced — a late stage of evolutionary experimentation.

The latest fossils, belonging to two specimens of Beipiaosaurus, appear to represent an early stage of experimentation. Unlike the feathers of Epidexipteryx and other proto-avians, they are composed of single rather than multiple, branching filaments. Paleontologists had assumed that early feathers took this form.

Tens of millions of years would pass before the descendants of Beipiaosaurus took to the air on an evolutionary trajectory leading to modern birds. In the meantime, wrote the authors in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the feathers' purposes are hard to determine. They're too thin and sparse to have aided in flight or heating, but their length and concentration around Beipiaosaurus' head, neck and tail suggests a display function.

Feathers, it seems, started as evolutionary bling.

Citation: "A new feather type in a nonavian theropod and the early evolution of feathers." By Xing Xu, Xiaoting Zheng and Hailu You. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 2, Jan. 12, 2009.